Witness says little about Willis case
Expected bombshell testimony never drops
ATLANTA – Call him the bombshell witness that wasn’t. Not yet anyway.
After weeks of buildup, a top defense lawyer on Friday called the man who she said knows all of the damning secrets of the “clandestine” relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and the private lawyer she hired to lead the Georgia election fraud case against former President Donald Trump and 14 others.
The witness, lawyer Terrence Bradley, was not only a law partner of Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor who has admitted to having an affair with Willis. He was also Wade’s divorce lawyer.
Bradley’s testimony capped a tumultuous two days’ worth of hearings called by a judge to determine whether Willis, Wade and the entire Fulton County DA’s office should be disqualified from the case – or the case dismissed outright – because of the relationship between the DA and her top Trump prosecutor.
Bradley spent a brief time on the stand Thursday. Then he was a no-show Friday morning, claiming he was at a doctor’s appointment and then awaiting the test results. Finally, the attorney arrived and settled in for hours of questioning.
Even under friendly questioning by defense lawyers, Bradley spent much of his time giving answers that were as curt as possible and claiming that attorney-client privilege prohibited him from saying anything about what Wade had told him about his relationship with Willis. Prosecutors – and Wade’s attorney – also fought to keep Bradley’s mouth shut, especially when it came to what Wade had shared with him about Willis.
Surprise filing about affair
Bradley was called as a witness by Ashleigh Merchant, the defense lawyer for former Trump 2020 campaign operative Michael Roman, who claimed in a bombshell court filing Jan. 8 that Willis and Wade had been having an affair before and during the time they were investigating Trump for trying to hand the election in the state to Trump despite his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
What’s more, Wade was allegedly using some of the more than $650,000 he’s made in the Trump case, which he joined Nov. 1, 2021, to take Willis on lavish romantic vacations to Napa Valley, the Caribbean and elsewhere. That made the whole Trump prosecution irrevocably tainted, Merchant has argued, because it amounts to a conflict of interest and “self-dealing” in which she improperly benefited financially from having an affair with the prosecutor she was paying.
Willis and Wade initially refused to comment on the allegations. But after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ordered Willis to respond by Feb. 2, she and Wade both filed affidavits acknowledging the “personal relationship.” Both, however, insisted that their romantic involvement began months after Willis hired Wade, thereby making it no different than other lawyer-to-lawyer relationships – and certainly no grounds for their disqualification or dismissal of the case.
Later that same day, Merchant filed a response saying she had evidence that their affair started long before then and that it corruptly factored into her hiring of the little-known private lawyer for the investigation in the first place.
During hours of legal back and forth Friday about the arcane rules of what constitutes attorney-client privilege, McAfee ruled that Bradley couldn’t talk about anything Wade told him about Willis.
Defense lawyers, including Trump attorney Steve Sadow, did manage to get Bradley to confirm that he had been emailing and texting back and forth with Merchant before she filed her case dismissal request on Jan. 8. Sadow asked to put into evidence to texts that Bradley admitted Friday that he had sent to Merchant.
Question of privilege
Even though he tried to say little on the stand, Bradley was forced to acknowledge that Merchant had sent him a copy of her motion to dismiss Willis days before she filed it Jan. 8.
And even though he’d been representing Wade in his divorce, and had been his law partner for several years, Bradley acknowledged that he texted Merchant after reading the motion. “I said, ‘looks good,’ ” he testified Friday.
What’s more, Bradley grudgingly acknowledged, in roundabout terms, that his response to Merchant – and potentially other conversations she said she had with him – were based on privileged information Wade had shared with him.
Anna Cross, a top prosecutor in Willis’ office, got Bradley to admit under cross-examination that he was forced to quit the law firm he shared with Bradley because of sexual assault allegations by an employee there.
Bradley emphatically denied the allegations, but conceded that the employee received funds from his escrow account. Cross told the judge her raising the issue was relevant because it went to the heart of whether Bradley was a credible witness – or someone with an ax to grind, suggesting he might have made up things about Wade and Willis’ affair because of their falling out.
In concluding the hearing Friday, McAfee said he wasn’t done yet. He called for a private meeting between parties to figure out what to do next, and he said that given that Bradley divulged information about Wade to a lawyer for one of the Trump case defendants, he now has to consider whether ordering Bradley to testify after all about what Wade told him.
“Now I’m left wondering if Mr. Bradley has been properly interpreting privilege this entire time,” the judge said.
During hours of legal back and forth Friday about the arcane rules of what constitutes attorney-client privilege, McAfee ruled that Bradley couldn’t talk about anything Wade told him about Willis.